Authors: Noël Browne
Another friend of mine, Pat Martin, was the son of a country rector in Cavan. He liked to claim that the Martins had their origins in ‘good British yeoman stock’. He had joined the
British Royal Navy and was a Pay-Master Lieutenant, but had been invalided out and had chosen to do medicine in Trinity.
Pat had a small car, which greatly facilitated our enjoyment of Dublin’s entertainments. While we were both conscientious about attending lectures and passing examinations, we did not
allow work to interfere with our indulgence in the bizarre nightlife available to us under the peculiar licensing laws of the time, the ‘bona fides’. These had originally been related
to the exigencies of travel by saddle and horse cars, but a visiting English journalist once wrote of the wild chariot race of cars that now left the city as the pubs closed each night. Circling
Dublin was a ring of euphoniously-named places, such as The Golden Ball, The Lamb Doyle’s, The Wren’s Nest, The Igo Inn, The Hole in the Wall, The Stepaside Inn. Entry was gained into a
totally darkened establishment simply by whispering the magic word, ‘traveller’. These dimly-lit places were peopled by small private groups, earnestly talking well into the dawn. They
were for the most part refugees from unhappy homes or marriages or money worries, or students such as ourselves.
Pat had much natural charm, and could talk the cross off an ass’s back. He would wheedle a late-night meal for us in some sleazy nighttown cafe by temporarily trading his presentation gold
watch or his superb black serge naval overcoat. Sometimes he might cash his cheque from the Indigent Protestant Fund through the good graces of John, the curate, or Davy Byrne himself, in the
famous ‘back room’. On one occasion, while we had a fish-and-chip supper in Fenian Street, behind the old Holles Street hospital, I found myself remembering the previous night’s
banquet at Nullamore — the gold plate, the gold cutlery, the museum-specimen Waterford glass. My appreciation of the kindness and generosity of the Chance family, which left me free to choose
my own path without any sense of indebtedness, has grown and deepened with the years.
Pat subsequently qualified as a doctor in England, and ended up back in the navy helping to man the guns at a Dieppe beachhead, saving the lives of wounded army and navy personnel during a
disastrous Allied commando raid. He was awarded a DSO.
Although it was becoming apparent that a war was approaching, I was lucky in being able to travel, although in conditions of austerity, through many countries of Europe. Many of these trips were
by canoe, the most memorable one taking place in the summer of 1938 when Peter Denham and I travelled down the Danube. We had met by chance during holiday time at the front gate of Trinity and he
suggested that I join him. Two years later, struck down by tuberculosis and confined to bed at Midhurst, I read in a travel book by an English canoeist that he was still wondering what had happened
to the two young Irish canoeists he had met as they gingerly put their canoe into the water on their thousand-mile passage. Since he could see that neither of us knew very much about canoeing, he
wondered if we had survived that ambitious journey.
The main dangers came where the already powerful flow of water in the river was compressed upwards and narrowed by its passage through the narrow sections of the medieval bridges of south
Germany and Austria, creating a torrential rush of water. With water up to and over the spray cover and around our waists, we found that it was best to hold our paddles horizontally while sitting
still and await an eventual projectile-like exit through the narrow arches of the bridges. A good sense of balance and a steady nerve was all that we needed. We capsized on one occasion, but with
the help of the lifeline, managed to manoeuvre the canoe into the bank, where we dried out our clothes. We lived nearly exclusively on black rye bread and cheese, and the incomparable Bavarian
lager. In time we arrived at Vienna, where we rested at a pleasant swimming pool at Klosterneuburg. From there, folding our canvas canoe, we travelled by train to the medieval city of Prague. In
Prague I was given attention for a dangerously poisoned foot, and a kindly steuermann gave us shelter and money, while we waited for money from home. Membership of An Oige permitted us to use the
many fine youth hostels; more frequently we camped on the bank. We ended that enjoyable journey with a ticket home, otherwise penniless, in the cathedral city of Cologne. I had one small orange,
and a bar of chocolate, total sustenance until I reached Dublin.
My wife carefully kept the address of the Hamburg steuermann of the barge who had been so helpful to us in Prague. At the end of the war, with little hope, she wrote to that address, and offered
him and his family whatever help he needed. Gladly we sent food parcels which helped them through the hungry immediate postwar years in Germany.
On my return from one of these European trips, in 1937, Lady Chance gently took me aside to say that a telegram had arrived in my absence with the sad news that my sister Eileen’s last
struggle to live had ended, at the age of twenty-nine. She had died in an Italian sanatorium near Lake Maggiore. As with my parents, she had continued to work on long after she should have accepted
defeat and called for medical help. Because of the extent of the disease, no serious attempt could be made to treat it.
In addition to her medical friends, who continued to visit her faithfully to the end, Eileen had been befriended by an Italian priest who worked in the Italian community church in Soho. He
pitied her distress, her tangled family life, and her hopeless condition and arranged for her to be sent out to the sanatorium in Italy with which his Order had links. Yet even in Italy, where they
had developed hopeful new techniques, she was beyond help.
Just before her death the Soho priest enabled Kitty, now aged twenty, to visit her. It was to be a last meeting of pure torment for both of them, for they had always had a very close
relationship. Kitty worshipped and loved Eileen deeply, and she never fully recovered from her loss.
Kitty was a kind and gentle person who loved children. Despite caring for all of us, she put herself through teacher-training college. Emigrating to the USA after the war, she became a teacher
in the United Nations School in New York. She did not share Eileen’s keen wit or administrative talent, but she was successful and happy in her chosen profession and enjoyed, for a few years,
the deep and loving care of her dear friend of twenty-five years, Lois Coy. Lois nursed Kitty through her long ordeal with Parkinson’s disease, treating her with dedicated concern and
self-sacrifice. Relentlessly, Kitty became a helpless, dependent cripple; I have never known greater love and dedication than Lois showed her. In 1980 Kitty died, following a fall that resulted in
an impacted shoulder fracture that was not recognized in the hospital. In their happy earlier lives together, Lois and Kitty had planned to live out their retirement in the quiet American county
town of Harrison on the Ohio river, at Lois’s family home. Instead, because of Kitty’s tragic death, these plans are no more. Lois flew Kitty’s remains for burial in the family
grave in the cemetery near their home. In time Lois intends to rejoin her friend, and share their last resting-place together.
My other surviving sister, Martha, two years older than I, is now retired, and lives in south-west England. She worked with an anti-aircraft battery during the war, and was invalided out after
an accident. A deeply religious Catholic, she has always been shocked by my activities.
This was a period in medical training when we could use the excellent apprenticeship system for medical students. The custom was for a student to live and work in hospital and gain practical
experience. On leaving Trinity in 1942, I went to the historic eighteenth-century Dr Steevens’ Hospital, which had associations with the great Dean Swift. We slept in tiny bedrooms under the
ancient roof in a place known as the ‘cockloft’. At that time a student served an apprenticeship in all aspects of medicine and pharmacology in the hospital, constantly on call on a
rota system to attend at the wards and outpatients department. There were incidents of all kinds day and night, trivial or fatal accidents and sometimes suicides. One of our senior physicians, Dr
Winder, was of the generation which still used the original wooden stethoscope, normally stored in a top hat, for diagnosing chest and heart diseases. The stethoscope was about nine inches long and
had a flat wooden disc at each end. Understandably, it was a very crude instrument; if the unhappy patient had sounds in his chest which could be heard through that stethoscope, there was not much
hope for his survival.
As a student I was presented with the need to make a judgement on the issue of euthanasia. Possibly many will accept as wisest and most humane the attitude adopted by the physician with whom I
was caring for a newly-admitted case, which was that the decision should be left to the discretion of the experienced medical attendant. Our patient was a young motor mechanic, who had been working
on a car. He needed petrol and, thoughtless about its dangers, had struck a match to light a cigarette. The petrol can exploded all over him and he was drenched with flaming liquid. All that
remained of the skin of his body was a nearly invisible narrow red slit, the remains of his lip, covering the inner edges of his mouth. His whole body was now an excruciatingly painful, jet black,
smouldering, quivering cinder.
I was astonished to see that in spite of the appalling damage to his body those residual lips still moved in low moans of pain. Clearly there was no hope for the man’s recovery. Nothing
could be done for him by us. I believe that the physician was right in deciding to inject a massive overdose of morphia into the man’s body. At the time I was shocked by the awesome finality
of that Godlike act. There is little doubt that, in time, society as a whole will come to accept the need to share with the profession such grave responsibilities which many now accept in lonely
isolation on society’s behalf.
While I was at Dr Steevens’ Hospital a strange fatal accident case was admitted about which I am still puzzled. This man had survived the 1914-18 war, and had volunteered as a rifle
shooting instructor. It was the practice for the instructor to lie flat on the ground, faced by his pupil, also lying flat on the ground, just a few inches away. The pupil held his .303 rifle to
his shoulder in the conventional way and took aim. The hairline front sight had to be at the bottom of the rear ‘V’ sight. The instructor held a four-inch fine wire circle in the centre
of which there were two dead straight wires of equal length, crossed as in a crucifix.
It was the instructor’s function to educate the pupil to fix the front hairline sight in the bottom of the rear ‘V’ sight of his rifle, then to fix these two at the exact point
at which the two wires crossed at the centre of the wire circle. The instructor then had to verify the correct position of all of these components of the exercise.
On this occasion, during a nightime instruction, the instructor, with one open eye, judged all this to be correct. He advised the pupil to make his first gentle pressure, then the second longer
pressure on the trigger, so as to fire the rifle. Then he shouted his command, ‘Fire!’ The instructor was dead, shot through the brain. We recovered the bullet from the pelvis. All my
life since I have wondered about that death. It was an incredibly unlikely accident. Was it murder? Was it a thoughtful suicide? The coroner’s verdict was the usual anodyne and meaningless
one, ‘death by misadventure’.
While in Steevens’ Hospital, I became involved in my first struggle against what I believed to be an injustice by authority. The matron of the hospital was a Miss Reeves, a fine lady, with
strict Victorian attitudes to individual behaviour. She was a first-class matron and had built up a training school with such standards of skill that the nursing in the hospital was quite
superb.
Miss Reeves believed that only by exercising a nearly penitential pattern of discipline could she achieve and maintain those high standards with the raw young girls who came from all parts of
Ireland for training. The Nurses’ Home was run like a Carmelite monastery. Absolutely no fraternisation was permitted between the young girls and the medical students on the staff, or indeed,
any male companion. Diet was spartan, the last meal possibly sardines on toast at five o’clock in the afternoon.
It was the practice then to treat consumptives suffering from tuberculosis of all forms with many strange, painful, even at times lethal procedures. The truth was that we did not know the cure
for the disease. One of the principles of treatment was the belief that fresh pure air, ideally like that of Switzerland, would help to kill the germs, but there was no scientific proof that this
was so. The Swiss hoteliers were delighted with their continuously filled rooms. Yet a desperate disease merited desperate remedies and the patients were encouraged to sleep out of doors on open
verandas. Sanatoria were invariably built with such verandas in the heart of the country, and the unfortunate patient, winter and summer, slept in the open air, depending on the whim of his doctor
or his particular nostrum for this frightening disease.
The nurses were compelled to work through the night in short-sleeved uniforms, and became more and more perished with cold as the night wore on. I shared their belief that this was unreasonable
and that a sweater, cardigan or pullover should be permitted. At that time, the overall leadership of the nursing profession was particularly obsequious and deferential to the members of the
medical profession, especially to the consultants. They successfully promoted the idea that nurses belonged to an angelic sector of society who must dedicate themselves entirely to the sick, as
though they had a religious vocation. Nurses were led to believe that membership of a trade union or preoccupation with terms of employment and living conditions in hospital was improper and
certainly not to be considered as subject for public protest. They accepted with awesome docility the discrepancies between the doctors’ income and their own in their separate vocations.